Latin American Migration, Once Limited to a Few Countries, Turns Into a Mass Exodus
CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico—The gathering of thousands of Haitians at the Texas-Mexico border this past week reflects a stark change in migration patterns to the U.S., driven by Covid-19. A far broader mix of nationalities is turning up at the border than in the past. For decades, most crossers were Mexican men and, in recent years, families from the troubled Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, known as the Northern Triangle. Suddenly Ecuadoreans, Brazilians, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, Haitians and Cubans are turning up by the hundreds of thousands, a trend that accelerated sharply in the past six months.
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The broad wave includes single mothers from Ecuador, Nicaraguan teenagers and farm laborers in Chile. Many cite the same reasons for uprooting their lives and heading north: economic hits from the pandemic that cost jobs and income, the allure of a booming U.S. economy and the belief that President Biden’s administration would welcome them. In July and August, migrants from other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean as a group outpaced those from either Mexico or individual countries from the Northern Triangle for the first time. The influx poses a challenge for the Biden administration. Encounters of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border are near a 20-year high. Border apprehensions are expected to reach about 1.7 million this year, twice the number from 2019. It is unknown how many cross undetected.
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Many of those apprehended are currently being sent back across the border under a public health authority known as Title 42 that both the Trump and Biden administrations have argued allows the U.S., during a public health emergency, to deny migrants’ rights to request asylum. Some, usually with small children, are allowed to enter and ask for asylum, adding to an already-overwhelmed asylum system. More than 9 in 10 of the migrants from other countries come from just six Latin American nations: Ecuador, Brazil, Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
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Latin America and the Caribbean as a whole suffered the world’s steepest economic contraction last year, and the region’s biggest decline since the Great Depression, according to the International Monetary Fund. The pandemic cost some 26 million jobs. Even when the pandemic recedes, the new migration patterns will likely persist. Immigrants to the U.S. often create a network of pathways that spur new migrants to head north, as those who succeed provide advice to family and friends, causing word to spread, immigration experts say... While thousands of Haitian and other migrants have already turned up at the U.S. border, there are tens of thousands still on their way, overwhelming border crossings in Colombia, Panama, and Mexico. In Panama, Haitian migration drove a record 70,000 undocumented migrants from January through August, more than the previous three years combined, according to government figures.
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But the overwhelming majority in Del Rio had left Haiti in the years after the devastating 2010 earthquake that killed some 200,000 people, moving to South American countries like Chile and Brazil that had lenient immigration rules. At the time, economists described it as a new wave of immigration from one developing country to another. Many of those migrants had been living near the bottom rung of the economy, selling food or footwear at street markets. That has made them particularly vulnerable to the economic shock caused by the pandemic. Chile, one of Latin America’s wealthiest nations, also tightened immigration requirements after receiving hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, Haitians and Cubans in recent years.
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/latin-american-migration-once-limited-to-a-few-countries-turns-into-a-mass-exodus-11632323297 (subscription)
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